Or basically, how much of your lifetime reading capacity have you wasted reading popular crap by mostly white men?
Yes, THIS. I'd love to see a bit more critical conversation about this list, because, wow, is it stacked in favor of a certain type of SF/F which itself strictly enforces racial and gender barriers, among others...
I discovered The Crystal Cave when I was 11 and it had a formative effect on my intellectual pursuits for the rest of my life, so it's hard for me to imagine encountering it as an adult. I believe it's a good, absorbing work of fantasy, though not as good as my 11-year-old self thought. It's a central and critical text for 20th-century Anglophone revisions of the Arthurian legend, and its influence on Arthuriana written since, especially in the fantasy genre, is immense.
Mary Stewart basically took the ideas of Rosemary Sutcliff and popularized them by writing a best-seller. The Crystal Cave is the first book of a trilogy that retells the Arthurian legends from the point of view of Merlin, and the first book treats his childhood and coming-of-age. The magic is deeply felt and put into a believable religious context, which I frankly wish more contemporary fantasy would attempt, and Stewart is the only author I've seen who manages to pull off interweaving an ahistorical medievalesque setting with real detail from the fifth century.
As I said, I loved the book as a child and found it very easy to identify with the main character's outsider perspective. As an adult, I think I would have been more struck by the ideas of sexuality in the trilogy, which are often problematic but completely fascinating in cultural context.
The trilogy has a lot of the unexamined and naturalized sexism common in historical fiction of the time--justified to some extent by the fact that it's narrated by a man from a sexist era, whose ideas of gender are somewhat critiqued (usually by Arthur). The narrator and protagonist, Merlin, is a straight man who is consistently misread as gay, or passes as such to appear innocuous, or is coded as such by the narration--which is remarkable in a bestseller in the US during the 1970s--and also clearly linked to Merlin's role as a point of identification for a female reader. You can draw a direct line from this trilogy to contemporary slash culture. The trilogy also strongly links Merlin's magical powers to his refusal to participate in sexual activity, which is also interesting, especially when later on (spoiler alert) it turns out this is not true for everyone with magic. Like I said, not unproblematic but very interesting.
The interesting thing about the book's appearance on this list is that it's a book by a woman which was marketed to women, often with very feminine jackets and copy--so it does stick out on the list gender-wise, though it does nothing to lessen the blinding whiteness...
no subject
Yes, THIS. I'd love to see a bit more critical conversation about this list, because, wow, is it stacked in favor of a certain type of SF/F which itself strictly enforces racial and gender barriers, among others...
I discovered The Crystal Cave when I was 11 and it had a formative effect on my intellectual pursuits for the rest of my life, so it's hard for me to imagine encountering it as an adult. I believe it's a good, absorbing work of fantasy, though not as good as my 11-year-old self thought. It's a central and critical text for 20th-century Anglophone revisions of the Arthurian legend, and its influence on Arthuriana written since, especially in the fantasy genre, is immense.
Mary Stewart basically took the ideas of Rosemary Sutcliff and popularized them by writing a best-seller. The Crystal Cave is the first book of a trilogy that retells the Arthurian legends from the point of view of Merlin, and the first book treats his childhood and coming-of-age. The magic is deeply felt and put into a believable religious context, which I frankly wish more contemporary fantasy would attempt, and Stewart is the only author I've seen who manages to pull off interweaving an ahistorical medievalesque setting with real detail from the fifth century.
As I said, I loved the book as a child and found it very easy to identify with the main character's outsider perspective. As an adult, I think I would have been more struck by the ideas of sexuality in the trilogy, which are often problematic but completely fascinating in cultural context.
The trilogy has a lot of the unexamined and naturalized sexism common in historical fiction of the time--justified to some extent by the fact that it's narrated by a man from a sexist era, whose ideas of gender are somewhat critiqued (usually by Arthur). The narrator and protagonist, Merlin, is a straight man who is consistently misread as gay, or passes as such to appear innocuous, or is coded as such by the narration--which is remarkable in a bestseller in the US during the 1970s--and also clearly linked to Merlin's role as a point of identification for a female reader. You can draw a direct line from this trilogy to contemporary slash culture. The trilogy also strongly links Merlin's magical powers to his refusal to participate in sexual activity, which is also interesting, especially when later on (spoiler alert) it turns out this is not true for everyone with magic. Like I said, not unproblematic but very interesting.
The interesting thing about the book's appearance on this list is that it's a book by a woman which was marketed to women, often with very feminine jackets and copy--so it does stick out on the list gender-wise, though it does nothing to lessen the blinding whiteness...